Media Watch: backstreet operations and the threat to Human Rights

The “milking of the health service” was the message coming loud and clear from Monday’s Daily Mail as it accused the NHS of a “fertility free for all”.

Its front page fury was sparked by two cases, one involving a single woman – with “no husband on the horizon” – who was allowed to have IVF after apparently threatening to invoke the Human Rights Act. The other, a “defiant” Nigerian woman, who stands accused of smuggling five babies into the country in her womb. She “applied for a six month visitor’s visa within days of discovering she was pregnant” with quintuplets, said the Mail.

Unrelated, we assume, was a picture just below the headline of the Duchess of Cambridge saying: “I want to start a family.”

The nurse is accused of offering £120 “manhood ops” in a block of flats, “where his pets roam nearby as he uses the grouting gun on men’s genitals”. Amazingly he responded: “It’s not rocket science… This is a sideline. I haven’t had any complications with any of the people I’ve done.” The practice is apparently legal.

As well as sort of calling for the Health Bill to be scrapped, again, the British Medical Association last week voted to back a further restriction on smokers. The BMA decided the smoking ban should not be limited to the public sphere, the Guardian reported, but should also cover the inside of private cars. Presumably doctors are big fans of that “new car smell”.

A story appearing everywhere over the weekend was a warning about liver disease in overweight children. Inimitably blunt, the Sunday Mirror warned of a “timebomb” for “half a million tubby youngsters”.